Tech Specs

HIGHEST REPORTED SALE

 $1,218,385

Past / Present

1996 Jaguar TWR XJ220S

1996 Jaguar TWR XJ220S

 An Absolute Monster of a Supercar

The concept was born out of Jaguar’s director of engineering, Jim Randle, wanting to bridge the gap between TWR GTP cars like the XJR-9 and the supercar market of the general public. The project’s goal was to create a supercar that was designed in-house that could win the 24hrs of Le Mans. But, lacking official support, Jim had to wrangle together a group of 12 volunteers that believed in the project enough to work on it in their off time. They eventually became known as ‘The Saturday Club’. It was due to their data gathering efforts that the XJ220 ever came to fruition. 

The lack of official support wasn’t the only hurdle this car had to overcome, one of the other most challenging design aspects was managing to fit an all wheel drive system (which Jaguar had virtually no experience in) into a mid-engine race car. However, the AWD system was eventually abandoned in favor of a traditional rear wheel drive system for the sake of design simplicity. When the XJ220 was finally unveiled at the 1988 British International Motor Show, the reception was so overwhelming that it actually overshadowed Ferrari’s debut of the F40 at the very same event. While not initially intended to be a production model available to the public, the amount of positive feedback and blank checks waved around by wealthy enthusiasts eventually convinced them to create a very limited run of around 280 cars for the public. While the original design featured a 6.2L V12, after seeing how much power both Ferrari and Porsche were pushing out of much smaller displacement engines using turbo chargers, TWR change the engine in the final production model to an all new twin turbocharged 6-cylinder engine pushing 542 hp and 475 ft/lbs of torque.

While the production model of the XJ220 is already an absolute monster of a supercar, there exists another, far rarer spec that pushed this 6-cylinder to its limits. The Marconi Museums’ car is one of only five XJ220S variants, essentially a street legal race car. Based off of the design for the XJ220C Le Mans race car, The S eschewed the luxury trim and features of the base model for a much more spartan and utilitarian styling and interior, with a focus on raw power. The primary and most impressive was the switch from the aluminum body to one piece carbon reinforced polymer, significantly reducing the overall weight of the car. To further reduce weight the plush leather interior and seats were replaced with performance kevlar seats as well as vinyl and plastic trim panels. The hidden headlights were also replaced with static lights covered in clear perspex to further reduce weight and improve aerodynamics. But by far the most impressive change other than the cutting edge one piece body, was TWR pushing the twin-turbo V6 all the way up to 690 hp.

This exceptionally rare car is one of only five to exist, with each car being painted a different color to further distinguish them. Because of this, the Jaguar team dubbed them the “The Opal Fruit Cars”. These colors consist of: Yellow, Orange, Red, Green and Blue. While most sources will state that there are six XJ220S cars, the alleged sixth car was purchased by a private buyer halfway through being assembled and was built to a completely different specification privately, and was never part of the 5 original fruit cars. It is for this reason that we and other experts consider there to be only 5.